Editor's Note

The Charge

Evil goes online

The Case

I always got a thrill every time a Miramax film was critically acclaimed.
Sure Miramax had some hits with films like Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient, but for every
hit they had to buy a dozen films at exorbitant prices. It wasn't really a
sustainable model, and what most of the arthouse crowd didn't realize is that
Miramax was being kept in the black by its partner company, Dimension. Without
films like Scary Movie and the
endless franchises Dimension took over (like Halloween and Hellraiser), Miramax might not have
survived as long as it did. Honestly, that's all that excuses some of the later
entries in those franchises. Hellraiser: Hellworld is a perfect example.
It's a decent little generic horror film straight out of the Nineties Dimension
playbook, but it succeeds in only bleeding Pinhead dry of whatever scare factor
he might have still possessed after six sequels.

Hellraiser: Hellworld takes place in a universe where Hellraiser has
been spun off into a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing game. The film
opens at the funeral of a man who got a little too into the game, with his
friends giving it up as a result. Fast forward a little bit, and someone is
advertising a party for players of the game at an isolated mansion. The friends
decide to go to the party, but things go horribly wrong as they're separated and
picked off one by one.

I'm not sure about the other direct-to-video Hellraiser films, but
the extras for this film reveal that it did indeed start life as another project
entirely. Those who make it through the whole film will find it very easy to
believe. Hellworld had the potential to be a really creepy story,
bringing the Hellraiser mythology into the twenty-first century with some
mind-bending plot twists courtesy of a videogame. Instead, we get a haunted
house tale with some guilt/revenge overtones with the Cenobites awkwardly
grafted on.

Which is a total shame. The film promises so much with its tagline of
"Evil goes online," and Pinhead in cyberspace is still an intriguing
premise. On the flip side, without all the Cenobite stuff, Hellworld
would be a decently creepy take on the haunted house genre. Instead, the haunted
house stuff feels underutilized as fans wait for the next peek at a Cenobite,
and the Cenobites seem kinda sad stuffed into the already overflowing
haunted-house plot. The tragedy is only emphasized by the fact that the film is
competently made, from the gore effects to the film's visual scheme.

Actors, apparently, have to eat, and despite the lower budget of this
sequel, the filmmakers managed to snag some serious talent in front of the
camera. Lance Henriksen (Millennium) plays the host of the
Hellworld party with his usual gravity, a gravity that far outstrips what the
writers put into the character. Katherine Wennick (Bones) plays the plucky heroine who is
initially reluctant to go to the party but who rises admirably to the challenges
of the house. Khary Payton (General Hospital) deserves a shout out as the
comical ethnic sidekick these films love to offer up. He meets the usual fate,
but he's good natured about it until the end.

Hellraiser: Hellworld gets a decent DVD re-release. The anamorphic
transfer is okay; for such a dark film I would have liked a bit more detail in
the shadow. However, overall the image looks fine, with good saturation and
little artefacting. The 5.1 track does fine with the film's dialogue, and the
surrounds kick in a bit here and there for atmosphere. Extras include a short
(13 minute) making of featurette with interviews and behind the scenes footage,
and a commentary with the director, writer, makeup FX designer, and producer.
The commentary is a lively affair, with lots of information on the production of
the film as well as its genesis in a non-Hellraiser project.

Hellraiser: Hellworld may be the best of the direct-to-video sequels
to the Hellraiser franchise, but that's only because it's a decent little
flick without the Cenobites. It's a shame the producers felt the need to
shoehorn what would have been an okay fright flick into their franchise, but the
blood, gore, and sex work well enough with Pinhead and his pals that this one is
at least worth a rental for fans of the franchise.